5.47pm: In a letter to EU leaders Greek president Antonis Samaras has said the country accepted the targets and purpose of the bailout programme but said some adjustments were needed. An interpretation of this:

#Samaras letter to EU leaders suggests #Greece hopes to get 1 or 2 yrs more to meet targets rather than substantial changes to targets

And on that note, it's time to close up for the evening. We'll be back tomorrow to cover the meat of the summit, which ends early so that Chancellor Merkel can get back to Germany for the Bundestag vote on the new eurozone rescue fund and the fiscal treaty. Thanks for all the comments, and goodnight.

4.44pm: European markets have closed, and with a bit of a late rally, you could almost believe investors may be thinking something concrete could come out of this two day EU summit after all.

The FTSE 100 finished 30.86 points down at 5493.06 after earlier being as low as 5436. With the Barclays' libor scandal hitting banking shares - Barclays itself slumped 15.5% - the sector accounted for around 29 points of the fall. Without that, amazingly, the UK index would have been pretty much unchanged.

Germany's Dax ended down 1.45%, and France's Cac lost 0.66%. But with hopes that, despite some of the posturing, EU politicians could come up with some short term measures to ease peripheral bond yields, Spanish and Italian yields have edged lower. As for their markets, Italy's FTSE MIB ended up 0.67% while Spain's Ibex has climbed 0.82%

4.31pm:An early take on the draft summit conclusions, courtesy of Reuters:

• EU leaders are to ask four top EU officials to develop specific, time-bound road map by the year end for genuine economic and monetary union. Interim report by October

• EU leaders to say banking union should cover all EU countries, but allow for differences between euro and non-euro countries

(Good luck with that last one ...)

4.17pm: Here's more on the UK prime minister's comments ahead of the summit, courtesy of Nicholas Watt:

Frank Baron/Guardian

David Cameron has indicated that he is prepared to wield Britain's EU veto again as he seeks to protect the City of London in negotiations to shore up the eurozone.

As he arrived at the EU summit in Brussels, where eurozone leaders will discuss plans to introduce greater fiscal co-ordination, the prime minister said that he would demand "safeguards".

Cameron and George Osborne believe it is in Britain's national interests for eurozone leaders to follow the "remorseless logic" of monetary union and take decisive steps towards a fiscal union.

The prime minister believes the single currency will be unsustainable without fiscal transfers from the prosperous – and fiscally disciplined – north to the less prosperous and less disciplined south.

But Britain will not take part in the new arrangements and it is determined to fight off any changes that would change the EU's single market, which covers all 27 members and not just the 17 members of the eurozone.

3.54pm:The International Monetary Fund has confirmed it will send a team to Athens next week, and hinted it was open to looking at easing the terms of Greece's economic programme. IMF spokesman Gerry Rice said, according to Reuters:

This mission will asses the recent economic developments. This visit wil be followed by a negotiating mission to discuss with the authorities the policies necessary to achieve the programme objectives.

The objectives of the programme as agreed remain the basis for those discussions, but as we have said before, if the new government has ideas on how those programme objectives can be achieved, then we are open to those discussions.

The new Greek government wants more time to implement €11.7bn of cuts demanded by the troika - the European Commission, IMF and ECB - in return for its bailout payments.

Meanwhile the IMF will also visit Cyprus next week for initial talks on a reform programme, with detailed negotiations about a bailout beginning later.

3.39pm: Reuters has pulled together some of the comments from EU leaders and officials ahead of the summit here.

3.11pm: Another voice has been added to those warning of the breakup of the euro, and it belongs to the president of the Spanish banking association.

As the EU summit meets to decide - among other things - what measures it can agree to help struggling Spain and Italy, Miguel Martin said a breakup "is not only possible but also even probable." Stephen Burgen in Barcelona writes:

Speaking at a conference in Santander, he said: "There are those who want a division of Europe between the good and the bad at a time when unity is not only desirable but essential and those with a surplus are just as guilty of errors in how Europe is organized as those with a deficit. Some want the ugly ones to leave, but we uglies want to stay in Europe."

He said that Spain would not be given a cent because "none of the money we get will be free because they don't give gifts," adding that Spaniards should be grateful if the money was loaned with advantageous conditions. "We have to use it well," he said, insisting that the government clarify its objectives otherwise it was impossible to know if they were attainable or not.

Martin said the financial system is worse than it was a year ago because "we still have unviable entities that prejudice the rest, the sovereign debt rating and the solvency of the state." However, he said Spain's real problem wasn't its banks but the fact that it had ceased to be able to compete with Germany.

"In future we will have to do better than them, as I imagine we will in the final of the Euro 2012," he said.

So no matter how apocalyptic you get about the current financial crisis, it seems you have to end with a football reference ...

David Cameron heading into the Brussels summit. Photograph: Laurent Dubrule/Reuters

3.02pm: With David Cameron arriving in Brussels for the EU summit, the UK prime minister has said he was determined to safeguard Britain's place in Europe.

But while he said eurozone members were right to press ahead with closer fiscal integration, Britain's priorities were different:

Of course we are saying to the eurozone countries they do need to do more things together to strengthen the currency and make sense of their currency, but Britain is going to stay out of that.

We want Europe to work for us, as a single market, as a place where we trade, as a place where we co-operate, and I'm going in there so that we get the safeguards to make sure that can keep happening.

Meanwhile the UK's triple A rating looks in danger, according to M&G Investment's bond experts in their latest blog. But in good news for Cameron and chancellor George Osborne, they say it may not matter much for UK bonds:

2.50pm: With European markets under pressure as the much anticipated EU summit gets under way, it's no surprise that Wall Street has followed suit.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average is down around 100 points in early trading, despite the latest economic data coming in pretty much as expected. US first quarter GDP growth was confirmed at 1.9% quarter on quarter, in line with initial estimates. Annalisa Piazza Newedge Strategy said:

Looking ahead, we expect GDP to run at around 1.5% in the second quarter as the economy seems to have lost some momentum due to uncertainties surrounding markets and the debt crisis in the euro area.

Initial jobless claims fell by 6,000 to 386,000 last week, with the previous week revised upwards by 5,000 to 392,000. The forecast was for 385,000, so a little higher than anticipated.

But its the eurozone fears which are unsettling US investors, as official posturing continued ahead of the meeting.

Graphic

2.29pm: Time for me to hand over to my colleague Nick Fletcher. Thanks for all your great comments.

1.49pm:A Greek banker fell to his death from the Acropolis this morning, the latest in a growing number of suicides in the debt-crippled country that has spiralled into a deep recession.

The man was in his 40s and worked at Greece's troubled state-owned agricultural lender, ATEbank. Police said he took a break shortly after arriving for work in the morning but never returned.

A police official told Reuters:

Guards and tourists saw him at the spot before the jump. Others heard a loud scream and saw him lying on the ground. It could be suicide, but there's no note.

This is not true. We've always said that we can talk about shared debt management only at the end of a process toward a genuine fiscal union.

The Journal article was headlined 'Berlin Blinks on Shared Debt'. In fact, Schäuble said Germany could agree to some form of debt mutualisation once Berlin is convinced the path toward establishing central European controls over national budgets is "irreversible." "There will be no jointly guaranteed bonds without a common fiscal policy," he told the Journal. This has been the German position all along.

1.11pm: Meanwhile, the French president François Hollande said Paris and Berlin were in broad agreement on measures to stimulate growth, but admitted that they still needed to hammer out a deal on short-term steps to stabilise the eurozone, by helping Spain and Italy whose borrowing costs have soared to unsustainable levels.

He told France 2 television before getting on the train to Brussesls for the two-day EU leaders summit:

There are points in common on growth luckily, Merkel has moved in the direction I wanted. There is also an agreement on the financial transaction tax, but we still need one on stability. There are ongoing discussions; it's normal. We need to act in support of the countries which need it: Spain and Italy.

12.26pm: There is some excitement about comments from the German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble, who indicated that Germany is willing to negotiate on euro bonds. But at the same time, he is insisting on a European budget czar - which is something Germany has been pushing for all along. Fiscal union needs to precede jointly guaranteed eurozone debt, Merkel's government has always argued - so it doesn't look like Germany's position has shifted.

12.00pm: The Irish finance minister just said that one of the main issues at the Brussels summit will be how to get Italian government bond yields to 4% or below - which seems rather specific. They are currently at 6.2%.

11.45am: Greek police have raided a warehouse churning out fake euro coins. Maybe they'd be better off making drachmas anyway.

Police in Thessaloniki said on Thursday that they had raided a workshop counterfeiting euro coins in the southeastern outskirts of the northern port.

The workshop, which appears to have been chiefly producing fake two-euro coins, is the first of its kind discovered in Greece to date.

Officers arrested two brothers who are believed to have been running the counterfeiting operation as well as a 59-year-old suspected accomplice who is said to have both Greek and Bulgarian citizenship.

11.01am: In case you're still hoping that something substantial might actually happen at today's summit, it won't. Barclays said today:

We expect these discussions to draw a roadmap for fiscal, financial and political union but we do not anticipate any major decisions on concrete short-term measures to reduce market stress beyond what has already been agreed.

10.32am: Earlier today, German unemployment dropped by a non-seasonally adjusted 46,200 in June, bringing the number of unemployed people to the lowest since December last year. However, this is the weakest June improvement since 2002. In seasonally-adjusted terms, unemployment increased slightly, leaving the jobless rate at 6.8%.

ING economist Carsten Brzeski said:

Over the last two years, the strong performance of the German labour market has had some positive impact on the often-mentioned rebalancing of the eurozone. According to Eurostat data, German labour costs have increased slightly faster than in the entire Eurozone, outpacing countries like Spain, Portugal or Italy but staying behind France. As differences, however, have remained rather small, this development should rather be called correction than rebalancing. Much more would be needed. Obviously, an end of the German job miracle and weaker external demand for German products would make recent wage increases one-offs and consequently Eurozone rebalancing even more difficult.

At first glance, today's numbers illustrate the strength of domestic demand, at least partly cushioning the German economy against the negative impact from the debt crisis. At second glance, however, signs are increasing that the resilience of the German labour market is slowly cracking up. The German labour market is losing momentum. This might not be a cause for concern for the German economy, yet, but definitely for the rest of the eurozone.

guardian.co.uk

10.20am:Italy's borrowing costs have jumped to the highest levels since December at a €5.4bn auction of 5- and 10-year government bonds. Its Treasury got the bond sales away, but the 10-year yield leapt to 6.19% from 6.03% at the previous auction at the end of May. The 5-year yield rose to 5.84% from 5.66%.

guardian.co.uk

10.02am:The debt crisis continued to sap business confidence in the eurozone this month. The European commission's economic sentiment index slipped by 0.6 percentage points to 89.9, leaving sentiment at its lowest level since October 2009.

Martin van Vliet at ING says:

June's decline in eurozone economic sentiment adds to growing evidence that the eurozone economy contracted pretty sharply in the second quarter.

On past form, the index is now consistent with quarterly falls in eurozone GDP of around 0.3%. The weakness in overall sentiment was driven by a sharp drop in both industrial and services confidence (which have the largest weights). Consumer confidence saw a smaller decline, and retail and construction confidence actually registered an improvement.

Guardian

9.55am: Our man in Brussels, Ian Traynor, says the real story will be the eurozone lunch summit tomorrow after the main summit ends, when we get the Monti-Merkel clash over short-term market relief action. Monti wants some kind of automatic trigger on secondary market bond purchases when spreads go too wide, provided said country is not behaving badly. Doubt he'll get it, but...

Ian adds from Brussels:

Berlin stuck to a hard line on the euro this morning hours before chancellor Angela Merkel arrives in Brussels to fend off pleas for help from much of Europe. "All eyes are on Germany," she said yesterday.

Briefing from Berlin, senior government officials dismissed concerns about the rising costs of borrowing for Spain and Italy as "exaggerated panic-mongering." They criticised a 10-year eurozone federation blueprint being discussed this evening as imbalanced, too much emphasis on pooling liability in the eurozone and not enough attention paid to fiscal discipline and democratic legitimacy.

There was scant sign of any concessions to Mario Monti, the Italian prime minister who is pleading for help in the bond markets to cut the cost of borrowing.

The eurozone could only use the instruments already established, the bailout funds – European Stability Mechanism and European Financial Stability Facility – according to the rules and with the usual very tight strings attached – conditionality. You can't change the rules for each possible bailout every time something new happens, the Germans stressed.

There was little sign of any breakthrough last night in Paris where Merkel had dinner with President Francois Hollande. One thing that was certainly discussed was when Hollande would get Merkel's fiscal pact ratified (the Germans do it tomorrow). Asked about this, a senior German said you will have to ask the French. Playing with a ratification delay may give Hollande a little leverage as Merkel is keen to get the pact up and running. Otherwise Hollande's armoury looks rather bare in the contest with Berlin.

All the signs are that the Germans are absolutely in no mood for turning, but Brussels is awash with rumour that Merkel might turn a blind eye to a move by Mario Draghi (Italian) at the European Central Bank to intervene on the secondary markets to buy up Italian bonds. If this is to happen, it will be at lunch tomorrow following the end of the EU summit when Draghi joins eurozone leaders for a separate session. Tomorrow's lunch looks like being the crunch bit of the two-day summit.

9.53am: Belatedly, here is today's agenda. All times are BST.

• Eurozone business confidence for June at 10am• Italian debt auctions between 10am and 10.30am• US GDP figures for the first quarter at 1.30pm• EU leaders summit in Brussels begins at 2pm

9.50am:Italy's employers lobby group Confindustria has slashed its growth forecasts for this year and next, and once again warned that the economy - the eurozone's third largest - had fallen into an "abyss".

The group now estimates the Italian economy will shrink by 2.4% this year, rather than the 1.6% decline forecast in December. Next year, it is set to contract by 0.3%, compared with a previous prediction of 0.6% growth.

Luca Paolazzi, head of Confindustria's research unit, said:

It seems to me we're in the abyss. We're not in a war, but the economic damage caused so far is equivalent to a conflict and the most vital and valuable parts of the Italian system have been hit: manufacturing industry and the young generations.

9.36am: The detail of the UK GDP figures reveals how much pressure most people are under: they are dipping into their savings to pay for food and utility bills. The household saving ratio has tumbled to the lowest level in a year, at 6.4%. Take-home pay, adjusted for inflation, is down by 0.9%.

Some economists say the UK is probably still in recession.

guardian.co.uk

9.30am: Britain's economy shrank by 0.3% between January and March, leaving the nation in its second recession in four years, the Office for National Statistics has just confirmed. But the contraction in the fourth quarter was worse than previously estimated, at 0.4% rather than 0.3%. This means the double dip recession is deeper than people thought.

9.26am:Spanish 10-year government bond yields are back above 7%. And the Italian equivalent is also up, at 6.28%. Italy will be holding bond auctions again today, with the €3bn 10-year auction expected to receive special scrutiny.

9.04am:Stock markets have turned negative: the FTSE is down 40 points at 5483, a 0.7% drop. Germany's Dax has lost 20 points, or 0.3%, to 6208, while France's CAC has shed more than 14 points, or 0.5%, to 3048. Spain's Ibex is off nearly 50 points, or 0.7%, at 6617 and Italy's FTSE MiB has tumbled 145 points to 13158, a 1% fall.

8.38am: In a jab at the Italian and Spanish leaders who have warned their countries' rising borrowing costs are unsustainable, the German government source warns against "exaggerated panic mongering" over the surge in interest rates on Spanish and Italian government debt.

8.28am: More from the German government source, who expresses scepticism that a new instrument can be developed to tackle Italy's problems. The source reiterates that it's up to the governments themselves to decide whether, when and how to use the available instruments.

Seeking to dampen pre-summit expectations, the source also says that "the question of progress towards a fiscal union cannot be resolved in one day". He reiterates Germany's opposition to using bailout funds to recapitalise banks while supervisory controls remain at the national level.

8.19am:A German government source is briefing journalists. Reuters reports him as saying that with the EFSF and ESM bailout funds, the EU already has all the necessary instruments at its disposal to deal with the crisis. The source also highlights the need to come up with precise, quick, appropriate help and a reform programme for Spain.

8.13am: Stock markets are more or less flat now. The consensus view seems to be that because expectations for the EU summit are so low, we could easily get a positive surprise if anything gets done.

Markus Huber at ETX Capital says:

European equities are trading slightly higher this morning receiving a modest boost from growing expectations that the ECB might be lowering interest rates next week in light of an ongoing worsening economic situation across Europe especially with also Germany, Europe's biggest economy starting to show pronounced weakness in economic activity as some of their main trading partners outside Europe, like China and USA are struggling themselves with the fallout of the European financial crisis.

Besides the approval of some growth measures already indirectly agreed on last week during a meeting in Rome between Merkel, Hollande, Monti and Rajoy it seems to be the case that barely anybody is expecting the EU summit to yield any substantial progress in regard to issuing Eurobonds and bringing down periphery interest rates to more sustainable levels. Therefore with expectations are already very low and a disappointing outcome likely similar to how it has been most times during countless meetings during the past couple of years, some speculate that there is plenty of room for a positive surprise.

8.11am: Over here in the UK, the row over Barclays' bid to manipulate interest rates is gathering pace. The bank's boss, Bob Diamond, finds himself under mounting pressure to resign in the wake of the Libor scandal. The bank was fined £290m for its "serious, widespread" role in trying to manipulate the price of key interest rates that affect the cost of borrowing for millions of customers around the world. More here.

8.03am:European shares are tentatively edging higher, as expected, but it ain't much of a rally. The FTSE in London is about 7 points ahead at 5531, a 0.1% gain. Germany's Dax and France's CAC are also up 0.1% while Spain's Ibex is flat and Italy's FTSE MiB has added 0.3% in the first few minutes of trading.

7.52am: On the corporate front, National Express's Spanish bus division is doing well despite the eurozone crisis. The company also said this morning that it's getting back money owed by Spanish municipal authorities. Transport revenues at the Spanish bus business, Alsa, climbed 5% in the last six months on a year ago, with intercity coach revenues up 3% while urban bus revenues were 6% ahead.

National Express said:

Alsa's performance has continued to be resilient... we continue to manage outstanding receivable balances from Spanish state bodies effectively, whilst also benefiting from the central government scheme to clear the backlog of municipal debts. By the end of May, state receivables had reduced by €12m since the end of 2011 to less than €45m.

7.48am:Stock markets are expected to open slightly higher. GFT Markets sees the FTSE up 12 points to 5535; the DAX up 2pts to 6230 and the CAC up 10pts to 3073 on yesterday's close.

Andrew Taylor at GFT says:

The European session should kick off the day on a positive note albeit with many participants willing to remain on the sidelines waiting for a clear outcome to this much anticipated risk event. There will be a raft of high end data being released from Europe and US today which will add to its edginess, and with the current low liquidity levels, moves will be swift and exaggerated.

7.40am: Here's a link to the EU summit agenda (click on Provisional agenda on the European Council page). Gary Jenkins of Swordfish Research says:

So we come to yet another summit where the whole world waits on anxiously to see if Europe can make any progress to resolve its crisis. We face the mother of all binary outcomes. The good news is that this time around expectations are very low; the bad news is that the main players seem to be diametrically opposed when it comes to a strategy for ending the crisis.

In a statement to Germany's lower house of parliament Ms Merkel repeated many of the comments that she made earlier in the week regarding the fact that Eurobonds etc. are unconstitutional in Germany and are also economically wrong and counterproductive. She added that "There can only be joint liability when adequate oversight is ensured…our work must convince those who have lost confidence in the eurozone, not by self-deception and sham solutions but by fighting the causes of the crisis."

Comments from other senior German officials repeated this mantra and it is clear that if the rest of the Eurozone does want mutualisation of debt then they must pay for it via a loss of sovereignty. Germany wants a fiscal union to be organised properly with controls and checks in place before they accept responsibility for everyone else's debts. Of course the obvious problem with this approach is that there may not be time to organise a fiscal union and perhaps more pertinently they do not have a mandate to do so.

The uncertainty that would be caused by referendums across Europe would probably lead to a withdrawal of funding from the likes of Spain at the first sight of any opinion poll suggesting that a country was going to veto the plan. Thus just to give themselves the opportunity to put such a scheme to the test they would have to be some form of further financial co-operation in the interim period. One problem is that politicians are only prepared to accede sovereignty when all other options have been exhausted, and then it's too late.

7.14am: Good morning and welcome back to our rolling coverage of the eurozone debt crisis and world economy. In Brussels, the long-awaited two-day summit of European leaders begins at 2pm BST today. It will be preceded by a German chancellery background briefing at 8am, and pre-summit meetings by the EU socialist, conservative and liberal leaders, according to news service RAN Squawk.

Italy's prime minister, Mario Monti, has warned of potential disaster if Europe's leaders don't club together and find a way to keep interest rates on Italy's debt down.

If Italians lose hope, this could unleash "political forces which say 'let European integration, let the euro, let this or that large country go to hell', which would be a disaster for the whole of the European Union," Monti said.

In another stark warning, his Spanish counterpart, Mariano Rajoy, reiterated yesterday that the EU must use all available instruments as "we can't fund ourselves at the prices we are paying for very long".

Italian borrowing costs surged yesterday after German chancellor Angela Merkel once again ruled out jointly guaranteed eurozone debt. The yield on the 10-year government bond rose to 6.226% this morning, while the Spanish equivalent is once again approaching 7%, climbing to 6.961% this morning.